What Is Snapchat Planet Order for Best Friends and How to Read Your BSF List
The Friends Solar System is one of the more thoughtful Snapchat Plus features. It assigns each of your eight most-active friends a planet — Mercury through Neptune — based on how often you interact with them. Tap someone’s Friendship Profile and you’ll see a glowing planet badge that tells you exactly where you rank in their world. That small image is more informative than it looks. Getting familiar with the Snapchat planet order for your BSF list turns a visual detail into a clear picture of your social habits on the app. Ranking systems like this appear across all kinds of platforms — loyalty tiers on casino sites like thorfortune, streak counters, closeness badges — because making your status visible tends to change your behavior.
How Snapchat Assigns Planets to Your Closest Friends
Friends Solar System is a Snapchat Plus exclusive. Once active, Snapchat maps your eight most-contacted friends onto the eight planets of the solar system — in order from the sun outward, starting with Mercury.
The sun represents you. Mercury is your most active friend on the app right now. Neptune is the eighth. The ranking is based on snapping, chatting, and engagement — not on who you’ve known longest or who you’re closest to in real life.
“The planet someone sees on your Friendship Profile isn’t about how well you know each other. It’s about how often you’ve been in contact on the app recently.”
The system runs in both directions. You appear as a planet in your friends’ solar systems too, and your position there is calculated from their interaction patterns with you — not yours with them. Two friends can hold entirely different planets in each other’s lists.
What Each Planet in the BSF Order Actually Represents
Every planet in the Snapchat BSF order has a distinct look — specific colors, orbiting hearts, and rings where relevant. You can recognize your rank at a glance without reading the label. Here is what each one means:
| Planet | Friendship Rank | Visual Design |
|---|---|---|
| Mercury | #1 Best Friend | Red planet, red and orange orbiting hearts |
| Venus | #2 Best Friend | Beige/light yellow, yellow and pink hearts |
| Earth | #3 Best Friend | Blue and green, moon icon, red hearts |
| Mars | #4 Best Friend | Reddish-orange, purple and blue hearts |
| Jupiter | #5 Best Friend | Striped reddish-orange, pink hearts |
| Saturn | #6 Best Friend | Orange with a ring, pink hearts |
| Uranus | #7 Best Friend | Green planet, no orbiting hearts |
| Neptune | #8 Best Friend | Blue planet, no orbiting hearts |
Mercury through Saturn all come with orbiting hearts. Uranus and Neptune don’t — a subtle visual cue that these friendships sit at the outer edge of your recent interaction history, still in your top eight, but with less daily contact than the inner planets.
One thing many users get wrong: the planets reflect interaction frequency, not emotional closeness. A friend you snap every day will outrank someone you consider much closer but rarely message on the app. The system reads behavior, not feeling.
How to Check Your Planet Position on Snapchat
Checking your rank in a friend’s BSF list takes a few seconds. You need an active Snapchat Plus subscription to access the feature. Here’s how to find your position:
- Open Snapchat and go to a friend’s profile by tapping their name or Bitmoji
- Look for a gold ring badge labeled either “Best Friends” or “Friends”
- Tap the badge to open the Friendship Profile screen
- Find your planet badge — this is your position in their solar system
- Tap the planet image to see its name and a brief description
- Check a few different friends to see where you appear across multiple lists
A “Best Friends” badge means both of you are in each other’s top eight. A “Friends” badge means the connection is one-directional — only one of you has the other in their top eight.
“Checking your planet position is one of those small Snapchat habits that ends up telling you a lot about where your daily attention actually goes.”
You can’t manually set your planet. The only way to move closer to Mercury is to actually snap more, reply to stories, and keep conversations going.
Why Your BSF Planet Rank Changes Over Time
The planet order isn’t fixed. Snapchat recalculates it based on a rolling window of recent activity, so the planet you see today can look different in a week. Several things shift your position:
- Volume of snaps sent and received with that person
- How often you message each other in direct chats
- Whether you view and respond to their Stories
- Story reactions and replies you send
- Consistency of your Snapchat activity over time
- Stretches of lower activity that drop your overall interaction count
Here’s how each planet range maps to typical interaction patterns:
| Planet Range | Interaction Level | Typical Pattern |
|---|---|---|
| Mercury – Venus | Very high | Daily snapping and regular chat |
| Earth – Mars | High | Several interactions most days |
| Jupiter – Saturn | Moderate | A few times per week, irregular |
| Uranus – Neptune | Lower | Occasional snaps or brief chats |
Many users check their planet rank the same way they check a Snapstreak — as a quick read on whether they’ve been keeping up with someone. Slipping toward Neptune is often enough to prompt a snap.
How Digital Platforms Use Friend Ranking Systems to Drive Engagement
Ranking users by engagement and making that rank visible is a pattern that appears across many types of digital products — social apps, loyalty programs, games. The reason it keeps showing up is that seeing your rank tends to change what you do next.
When you notice you’ve dropped to Saturn in a friend’s system, you’re more likely to send a snap than if you had no visibility at all. The planet metaphor softens what is essentially a behavioral metric, and that’s a deliberate design choice.
For Snapchat, the Friends Solar System serves a dual purpose. It gives Snapchat Plus subscribers something visually appealing and genuinely useful. It also builds a low-key sense of social accountability into everyday use. Most users engage with it first out of curiosity, then keep checking it out of habit.
The Snapchat BSF planet order doesn’t judge your friendships — it just shows you where your attention has actually been. That turns out to be more useful than most people expect.
FAQs
What is the planet order for Snapchat best friends?
The Snapchat planet order goes from Mercury (#1 best friend) to Neptune (#8), following the real solar system. Mercury is the person you interact with most, and each planet outward represents a progressively less frequent contact.
What does it mean if you are Neptune on Snapchat?
Being someone’s Neptune means you are their eighth closest friend based on recent interaction. You are still in their top eight, but your snap and chat frequency with them is lower than the other seven people in the system.
How do you become someone’s Mercury on Snapchat?
To reach Mercury on a friend’s BSF list, you need to consistently interact with them more than anyone else — send snaps daily, reply to their stories, and keep conversations active. The system tracks a rolling window of recent activity, so sustained effort is what moves you closer to the sun.
Amber Burnett
Amber Burnett, M.A., is a communication expert and educator with over 15 years of experience driving social media growth. She is sharing snapchat growth at scplanetorder.com. Specialising in effective communication, collaboration, and STEM education, she has a proven track record of building successful businesses across the globe. She is serving as lecturer at school of professional communication at Texas Tech University.